I'm still wondering what happens if you twist the robot's nipples. Ooops, we're not allowed that word, are we? But you know, from a purely functional perspective, the robot doesn't just have mounds there, there are buttons, therefore they must do something. What?

I like the backdrop a lot including the wine fountain, pinot noire, I betcha. There ought to be a bunch of teenagers hanging around that place.
I like her dress and hair but I don't understand her posture; why and how that tremendous arch on her right side?
He looks like a young Olivier quoting Romeo.

I had left out a very important piece of the picture, I realized this morning. So now I have gone and fixed that, and reposted the picture up above. You'll now see there is another figure at the top of the stairs, who brings another whole aspect into the scene. I also fixed the lady's overly arched front a bit.

The story here, of course, is not the lady in front but the young man in the middle, made more clear now by the addition of the new figure up above. The choice of color for her is intentional: while her clothing, etc. are very fine, their shade is similar in hue to the building, indicating that she represents the temptation of the material (as does her beauty, of course). The other spots of color are the robes the men are wearing, representing their monastic vocation; and the water in the fountain behind the young man, more or less equidistant from him as the young lady, and representing purity.

I don't often go for a lot of symbolism, but this one seemed to come together that way.

As for what they are discussing, that is where your own imaginations can come into play...

Pardon the interruption but there is a new site you should definitely check out:

Very nice! Looking forward to more info on the site as the two of you develop it! Thank you for the mention as well. I'm thinking the picture above certainly look like the sort of thing that would spark your imagination, if you need more story ideas...

Were you not paying attention to the wine fountain? Rumor has it it yields nothing but Merlot which explains why they are a mute order; they spend their time contemplating why it is their god deprives them of Shiraz, not to mention Pinot Noir.

The Sheepster has a point, Mr. Radical Thorn, sir. True progress in CGI, and any ability to generate comic books from same, will require the ability to create all the varieties of the world's population.

Dealing with TLWSHLWM's computer and putting up the Seven Threads website has kept me out of the fiction business for the last week and a half. I can only do so many useful things for so many hours in a day and then I must take some time off to play.....or to sleep....or to lose my mind to never-never land...or post anonymously on other people's blogs....or whatever it is that happens to me.

* ennui is one of the Greek gods so unimportant that her name is not even capitalized.

No disagreements on the subject of character attribute variation. The human models are actually capable of a reasonable degree of manipulation, both skinny and overweight, although subject to the same limitations as aging - just as you can't imitate wrinkled skin save through painted on textures, you can't introduce rolls of skin such as heavy people exhibit. The skin on the models is not a deformable structure (at least not in an additive sense like this, although you can shrink and expand the 'envelope' as a whole).

The problem is more the conforming clothes. That the clothes attach themselves and move with the figure is one of the neat things about them, but they are quite complex models in themselves. The designers of the better quality clothes also build in adjustment parameters for them so that if the underlying figure is altered, the clothing parts alter too (which accounts for their greater cost, as the designer has to build a lot of extra stuff into them). However, there are limits to how far the clothing can 'stretch.' One limitation, aside from the physical parameters of the model's structure, is the texture applied to it. On real clothes, of course, more cloth is used to make a larger size. On a model, it just stretches the way the human model's skin is stretched (as a 3D model surface). When you do this the texture doesn't 'grow,' it just stretches too. So extreme enlargement just makes the textures look really bad, like a polyester pattern on someone who needs to lose a few pounds. There's a great sumo wrestler-sized model one can buy, but you can't put any clothes on him other than a sumo loin cloth...

Back on the picture front... I find that one can never tell where a given piece of art is going to go. I started out with the intention of making a sci fi picture of someone walking down an urban street, but ended up here instead...